On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:59:38 -0400, Jim Henry <[log in to unmask]> 
>wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Logan Kearsley
>><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>[snip]
>> There's no grammatical number, gender, or case, and tense is optional
>> (marked with tense/aspect particles).
>What about valency, evidentiality and mood?  I seem to recall from
>a summary someone (Tom Chappell?) posted a while ago of a
>cross-linguistic study of verb inflection and derivation that valency
>is marked on verbs in more language than any other category,
>and mood is marked in more languages than tense or aspect.
>Can't remember where evidentiality/validationality stand in
>the ranking.  
>[snip]

You should probably read all of
Item #129431 (19 Dec 2005 12:04) - Re: Transitivity marking on verbs.
< http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind0512C&L=CONLANG&P=R5985&D=1&H=0&O=T&T=1 >

I'm not going to quote the whole thing, though I think almost all of it is 
relevant to this question.

But here's the _most_ relevant part:

[quote]

According to Thomas E. Payne's "Describing Morphology", and also to Joan L. 
Bybee's "Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form" 
(Typological Studies in Language #9; John Benjamins Publishing Company, 
P241.B9 1985), "valence" is the commonest morphology on verbs.  84% of 
languages in Bybee's 50-language, one-language-per-"phylum" sample had 
valence derivation, and 6% had valence inflection. (Consult her book for 
the difference between derivation and inflection, as she used those terms 
in her book.)

She considered valence, voice, aspect (not including "perfect"* 
or "retrospective"), tense (including "perfect"* or "retrospective"), mood 
(including evidentials), number agreement with any one or more argument(s), 
person agreement with any one or more argument(s), and gender agreement 
with any one or more argument(s).  (Bybee used a somewhat restricted 
definition of "mood", yet it was still the semantically-broadest of all of 
these categories.  Consult her book for the definition of "mood" she used 
in it.)

*(BTW I would have included "perfect" as a mood, rather than a tense; but 
at any rate Bybee agrees with me that it is not an aspect.)

In order by fraction of sampled languages which marked them either by 
inflection or derivation, either an affix or a stem-change, the categories 
were;
90% valence
74% aspect
68% mood
66% number
56% voice (tied with person)
56% person (tied with voice)
50% tense
28% person of a second participant (e.g. object)
16% gender

In order by fraction of sampled languages which marked them by inflection, 
the categories were;
68% mood
56% person
54% number
52% aspect
48% tense
28% person of a second participant (e.g. object)
26% voice
16% gender
6%  valence

This next table doesn't come from Bybee; I got these values by subtracting 
the values in the table above.  In order by fraction of sampled languages 
which marked them by derivation only (not by inflection), the categories 
were;
84% valence
30% voice
22% aspect
12% number
2%  tense
0%  mood
0%  person
0%  person of a second participant (e.g. object)
0%  gender

Bybee says the most frequent type of valence morpheme was causatives.

If you are going to mark valence on _every_ verb, then, in your conlang, 
valence will be an _inflectional_, rather than a _derivational_, category, 
as far as Bybee's use of those terms would go.  (The biggest difference 
between "derivation" and "inflection" is that an "inflectional" feature is 
obligatory and productive -- there is a way to mark every value of that 
feature on any new word in the open class (verbs, in this case) -- 
while "derivation" is optional and not completely productive -- not every 
word in the class (in this case, verbs) has to be marked for the feature, 
and some values of the feature cannot be marked on some words in the 
class.)  As you can see from above, Bybee found that, while valence-marking 
is "nearly universal", _inflection_ for valence is rather rare.

[/quote]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also relevant:
Item #128737 (21 Nov 2005 13:16) - Re: Test for middle voice?
< http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind0511C&L=CONLANG&P=R8159&D=1&H=0&O=T&T=1 >
says:
[quote]
Thomas E. Payne in "Describing Morphosyntax"(1997) says Joan Bybee 
in "Morphology"(1985) says that valence-adjusting and voice are the most 
common morphology marked on verbs. 84% of languages have derivations 
marking valency or voice, and another 6% have inflections marking valency or 
voice, so 90% of languages mark their verbs with valency or voice somehow.  
Aspect is second at 74%, and mood, mode, and modality is third at 68%.  (I 
have not had a chance to read Bybee's work yet, so I do not know whether 
she includes retrospective ("perfect") and prospective as aspects, which is 
traditional, or as moods or modes or modalities, which I believe is correct; nor 
whether she includes evidentials and miratives and mediatives among the 
moods and modes and modalities.  That could reverse the order of Aspect and 
Mood, or maybe not.)  Tense is only seventh, at 50%.  However AMT (usually 
written TAM) is usually inflectional rather than derivational, while voice and 
valency are usually derivational rather than inflectional, so TAM dominate 
inflection of verbs, even though voice and valency dominate morphology of 
verbs overall.
[/quote]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two more posts which might be not-too-tangentially relevant (or, at least, 
interesting);

Item #129130 (6 Dec 2005 22:17) - Re: isolating is equivalent to inflected
< http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind0512A&L=CONLANG&P=R10151&D=1&H=0&O=T&T=1 >
says:
[quote]
In "my" book (the one my public library borrowed from some other 
library) these examples are on page 55.  They are in subsection 1.2 in 
Section 1, "The Basic-Derived Relation", of Chapter 3, "The 
Organization of Paradigms", in Part I, "Morphology and Morpho-
Phonemics".
She says these examples come from "Bybee and Brewer 1980", which would 
be Lingua 52.271-312, "Explanation in Morphophonemics: Changes in 
Provencal and Spanish Preterite Forms".
*From Joan L. Bybee's "Morphology", (which is referred to by Thomas E. 
Payne's "Describing Morphosyntax")
(Typological Studies in Language 9
Joan L. Bybee (SUNY at Buffalo)
Morphology
A Study of the Relation Between Meaning and Form
John Benjamins Publishing Company
P241.B9 1985 (Dewey number 415)
ISSN 0167-7373 v.9
ISBN 0-915027-38-0)
[/quote]

Item #129158 (7 Dec 2005 20:00) - Re: What's a good isolating language to 
look at
< http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind0512A&L=CONLANG&P=R12019&D=1&H=0&O=T&T=1 >
says:
[quote]
Joan L. Bybee answered the question João Ricardo de Mendonça asks of 
Ray A. Brown "No" in her "Morphology" book (1985).  (Incidentally, 
she's at the University of New Mexico now; and she is the same author 
as the Joan B. Hooper who published from around 1972 (or before) to 
around 1981 (or after), tho' she apparently started using Joan L. 
Bybee (again?) in 1980 or before.)
Bybee quotes Sapir as having also decided that there weren't any 
purely isolating, nor purely polysynthetic, nor purely agglutinating, 
nor purely fusing languages, IIRC; and quotes counts collected by 
Thorndike supporting such a conclusion.
Bybee makes her own point, that, the derivational morphology of a 
language is likely to be more towards the fusing (as opposed to the 
agglutinating) end than the inflectional morphology of the same 
language.  (Of course, she also makes the point -- and I know she was 
not the first author I read to make it -- that, in any given 
language, the dividing line between "derivation" and "inflection" 
is "fuzzy".)  She backs it up with several examples; Slavic aspectual 
affixes that have more semantic content than just aspect; patient-
number-agreement affixes in various (mostly ergative) languages that 
have more semantic content than just grammatical number of patients; 
etc.
[/quote]